Musings on women and food.

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An orange on the table

Having just been to my first Passover seder, I can’t adequately explain the significance of all the edible and nonedible parts of the elaborate, symbolic meal that marks the one of the most important holidays for Jews.

[In 1984, Susannah Heschel, a leading Jewish feminist scholar,] was visiting a college in the Northeast where she learned that some of the students had started placing crusts of bread on their seder plates as a way to express the exclusion of women and homosexuals from Judaism.

Heschel thought this was great. But since it violated the Passover dietary restrictions, she decided to modify the act, placing an orange on the plate instead of the bread crust to represent both women and homosexuals.

“The first year I used a tangerine,” the mother of two revealed to the packed room of mostly women and some men. “Everyone at the seder got a section of it and as we ate it we would spit out the seeds in solidarity with homosexuals — the seeds represented homophobia.”